Developers will ALWAYS have an excuse for bad sales. 3rd party games cant sell on the Wii, Nintendo's games are too hard to compete with, LAIR needs a review guide to properly play it, PSP cant sell software, PC market is dying etc. etc. etc. Piracy is just a very good scapegoat but once you start thinking logically and not using "morals" you will realize that piracy doesnt have much of an effect on gaming industry.

If anything developers should bag on Gamestop with its sell used games policy which results in huge profits for gamestop and zero revenue for developers. But we are talking about PC market so I am going to stay on topic. Have any of you tried to buy a one or two year old game that was not that popular in store? Due to Gamestop allocating literally a shelf and a half to PC games, all PC games get removed very quickly. I am currently downloading several games and all of them are at least 4 years old simply because I cant find these games in any gamestop store and buying them from somebody else on ebay doesnt help developers at all.

So far every argument I have seen against piracy was based on "ethics" and "morals" while every logical study that has been accomplished showed that piracy has a minor effect on the industry. I am currently trying to find a chart that showed just how many billions of dollars were spent on used games and almost every used game sale is a lost sale for a developers. Due to used games Gamestop stops holding new versions of the games quite quickly and whenever you try to buy a game the salesperson will always tell you to buy the used version.

In conclusion, I could care less about bad developers not getting sales due to piracy, I could care less about morals I only care about legal consequences which will not happen unless you are the one hosting pirate websites but even they are not affected and developers should really think about dealing with Gamestop, and the easiest way is to move to Steam or something like that.

Sins of a Solar Empire does not have any DRM and amazingly enough their game sold very well. And trust me DRM ENCOURAGES piracy, I recommend reading some of the reactions when people realized that you need to activate Mass Effect online every 10 days or limited installs in Bioshock or Spore online activations. DRM's are not tools to prevent piracy, they are tools to control the consumers and that's why a lot of companies want the PC to die since consoles provide a much controllable experience.

That's what people pirating games would have you believe...

Personally as a customer I have no issue with DRM...

A lot of the posts reacting to Mass Effect possible DRM were actually laughable....( I'm going on a desert island with no internet and won't be able to play Mass Effect due to the online activation ...gimme a break...)

Your argument about currently pirating games because you can't find them anywhere is poor. You can in all likelyhood download those old games from steam or from the publisher website....

1) Did I say that any company was praising it for profits? Where did I ever make that point? Furthermore, where are you getting this 30 billion illegal downloads. I'm sorry, but there is no way to tell how many downloads are illegal because everything traded over P2P is not illegal. There is also media that is out of print/discontinued/not available as well as the fact that some people who download and don't buy never would have bought it anyway. The burden of proof is on the industry because they are making the positive assertion that P2P is crippling them, it's not on anyone else to prove that it isn't true. So far, they haven't done this. They've only provided gross speculation on dollar amounts that they've lost every year and the number of illegal downloads, which are two things that they can't possibly know or prove..

2) Are you paying any attention? I think you damn well that I'm talking about Napster before it was legit. I never said that P2P had no effects whatsoever, now did I? I said that the effect is nowhere near what the industry claims. This is why I brought up Napster, not to compare it to the industry, but to show that P2P can't be having such a serious effect if record labels were seeing record highs when Napster was at the height of its popularity.

3) When the industry demonized people who enjoy listening to their music, they were indeed assaulting their own fanbase. You do realize that there are people out there who use P2P and buy the music, right? Demonizing their fanbase and conducting legal threats against children and elderly people did nothing more but tarnish their image in the eyes of the public. If their intention was to get people to buy their music, then they fucked up.

4) Then you're wrong. As has been stated time and time again, theft involves the taking away of physical property so that the owner no longer has it. If you keep arguing that it's theft, then you're either wilfully ignorant or just plain stupid. Neither one looks too good.

5) It's because someone in the industry finally provided a palatable way for people to get what they wanted. It has nothing to do with ethics. Had they focused on improving their product and business model from the outset instead of branding people as pirates and making legal threats, then they'd hve been a lot better off.

1 + 2.  Just send me $100.  Honestly you have to make thousands of dollars each year.  You won't miss it.  Life will go on for you.  You admit that they are losing money, it's unquantifiable, should they be forced to incur losses just because it's so easy to steal music. 

3.  People that buy music and do P2P are pirates.  Still the defination.  You seem to think that the industry calling them pirates is bad and they get what they deserve when individuals go full P2P versus a mix.

4.  Your definition involved physical property.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft  Actual definition only states property.  Which intellectual rights are, and an intent to deprive the original owner (from the profits they would receive).  But keep calling me names.  You won't get any hits if you type "intellectual property theft" into a search engine.  Nope.  I'm the only "wilingful ignorant" person.  At least you get it.

5.  It's cool.  You want to steal music because it's expensive and you can.  Not a rationalization at all. 

You seem to be bent on ruining the Music in lets take your stance to the extreme.  Let's say you make the next Mickey Mouse.  You wright a story and make pictures of all the characters etc.  You pitch your idea to Disney.  They love it.  So they have an intern copy all of your artwork and story.  They tell you that they don't want to pay you any money for it because you don't have any physical goods to sell.  So they use your exact story, exact characters, and come out with a whole line of movies, toys, etc.  They make millions.  You make $0.  Sound like a good life?  They didn't steal anything right?  Sign me up.

You can argue the theft thingy all day long in a court of law and you will loose.

And at the end of the day I believe that is all that matters, wether it is a bannable offense that is currently being punished by the law or not...

Like someone pointed above Intellectual property is property too......

The criminal penalties in the US for software piracy are actually a lot harsher than those for petty theft too...

Ok, the world change, distribution change, technology change, the ways of earning money change.

Let us go back to the 70's or the early 80's here in Sweden where the "live musicians union" had big protests against dance clubs without live music. They argued that every "club night" without live music meant a loss for the live scene and that live music would die out eventually and that only record companies and producers would make money "in the future". The problem with software is that it's only available in "one form", as a digital package. But as people mentioned, a way to get rid of piracy is to force the players to connect to the internet to play the game, a way that I personally hate, I hate Valve for the ugly abomination called Steam.

They are doing it because it gives them an advantage politially.

Tell you what pal. Look up any of the research or current economic theory on piracy. Then we can have this conversation.

The problem is we're argueing as someone who's done research on it (Me.) VS someone with an opinion. (you.)

Also he wouldn't lose the theft thing... your just ignorant.  Or english isn't your first language and you don't understand the words quite right i guess.

When you get arrested for piracy you get charged for copyright infringement.  Not theft.  Copyright infringement infact is a much much less serious crime.

Seriously... someone who steals a CD vs a store... will be punished much harsher then someone who downloads a CD online.

 Yes because it's a given fact that you know a lot more that about every member of the software industry...

Which by the way I am a member of.

The company I work for, which is no way a big one, has recovered over 3 million $ of unpaid royalties over the last 4 years, that's only the tip of the iceberg and represents more than 5% of our revenue... 

Funny thing, is, if you were to own your own account go offline (with steam), let someone else go on, use hamachi

they get to play that game along with you via lan.

Just something to think about.

Also, piracy only affects those trying to make a sale.